There are no sets of The Knot-Shop Man left to buy here, sorry. There was never a marketing push — they were mostly discovered and bought by Planetarium readers. If there's ever another release (not a limited edition tied-up set, though) of course it will get a mention on the Beholder website.
The Readers Only pages of the website are now open. If you have your books to hand, you can access them for knot-related details on some of the characters in the stories. Don’t look until you’ve read the stories because there may be spoilers.
2024: the Readers Only pages have now been closed.
If you’ve bought a set of the books you will have discovered that the illustrations have colour added (I didn’t mention this on the site because it’s an extra detail rather than a selling point, and because "hand coloured" isn’t quite accurate, since really it’s more like annotation than colouring . . . you’ll know when you see it).
Anyway, the point is that I now know that a batch went out in which one of the illustrations in Earth wasn’t coloured. Because the sets are tied up and boxed, I’ve got no way of knowing for sure exactly how many books have some green missing (it may be as many as 24). If you’re one of the unlucky recipients of one of the bad books, then please accept my apologies and share in my anguish. There’s a lot of work in each of these sets — in total, 3200 illustrations needed colour added, by hand, and 800 of those are the fiddly "double-spreads" — so it’s frustrating that somehow I missed some.
If you’re trying to tie the books together again, there’s an error so small in the instructions that you probably won’t have spotted it: but just in case it muddled things for you, there’s now a correction on the website.
We’ve also added a review of the books (warning: may contain spoilers) from venerable knot expert Geoffrey Budworth.
We are proud to announce that The Knot-Shop Man is published today. Pre-ordered copies started arriving at readers’ doors yesterday. Now you can untie those knots and read the stories! Happy 10th Anniversary, Planetarium!
Photos and video from backstage at Exploding Pen, where we have been busy preparing The Knot-Shop Man pre-orders for shipping for 09/09/09.
If you want to journey to Arxnodorum, where the knots of fate are tied, you’ll need a coin with a hole in the middle. The cover artwork for each book features such a coin, together with right-hand lay three-strand manilla rope. You can see the covers, for the first time, here on the website.
Now available: read the start of Chapter 1 from each of the four books.
Now available: read the very short story The Earth Baby online, or download (and share!) the PDF.
Now available: read the very short story The Firework-Maker & the Dragon online, or download (and share!) the PDF.
Now available: read the short story The Poet & the Princess online, or download (and share!) the PDF.
Now available: read the very short story The Fisherman & the Mermaid online, or download (and share!) the PDF.
As part of the release of the The Knot-Shop Man, we’re pleased to finally let this story out. It was written especially for the website as part of the project. Read The Girl & the Wolf online, or download (and share!) the PDF.
We’ve got more stories to be released over the next few weeks, so check for updates (or subscribe to the RSS feed).
The books are currently being read by selected youngsters while the illustrations are being completed. If our readers give it the thumbs-up we’ll be going to print in a month or so. If they don’t, well, we’ll probably tie their ears together with painful lobe-hitches and string them up from a clothes line until they do.
And, as you can see, at last The Knot-Shop Man is here on the Beholder website.